Monthly Archives: March 2014

Ronnie the Rooster is the first short-story I wrote. I’ve no idea who Ronnie is based on or where his story came from. I couldn’t find another place to use it so I crowbarred it into my debut novel, Bobby’s Boy.

Since It’s my birthday, I’m indulging myself. This is one of my favourite stories to have written. Enjoy.

Over 18s only (or those who enjoy tales of bionic fuckery at least).

Never trust an OAP from Caldercruix with a glint in his eye and a bulge in his trousers.

Ronnie the Rooster

Ronnie was a chicken farmer from Caldercruix who had grafted for decades, rearing chickens and supplying excellent quality eggs and meat to the local farmers’ markets on weekends. Ronnie loved his life. In his mid-fifties, he had been happily married for nearly thirty years to his beloved Agnes. Together, they’d worked hard, built a profitable business and raised three kids, sending each in turn out into the world to make their way.

Their eldest, Ronald Jnr, had moved to Surrey and was running a successful legal practice. He specialised in family law, mainly divorces, which Ronnie Senior found a little sad. The old man often wondered if Ronnie Junior was really happy in what could be such a demanding and sometimes heartbreaking role. Young Ronnie still called his dad three or four times a week to talk about the football, the horses, or just to catch up. Old Ronnie appreciated that as he knew how tight the lad’s time was.

Senga, their daughter, was an experienced emergency room doctor and was well through her training to become a general surgeon. She worked in Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, which was a forty-minute drive east along the M8 motorway, and she’d found a home nearby the hospital in the city centre. Ronnie and Agnes saw her often thanks to her living within commutable distance. Senga had that rare gift of being hugely intelligent, but utterly inclusive and sweet to everyone around her, whilst still being no one’s fool. Ronnie Senior honestly couldn’t remember the girl getting upset about anything or saying a bad word about anyone. Everyone loved Senga. She was a born “fixer” and a natural doctor as a result of her accepting and caring attitude.

Their youngest boy, Steven, named after his grandfather on his mother’s side, was a different breed. Steven was sugar and shite in that you could see Steven on one occasion and he would be everyone’s pal, lighting up the room and bringing a carnival of fun with him. The next time you saw him he’d be a moody, angry wee fanny. He was an artist and while old Ronnie loved his unpredictable, tornado of a personality, young Ronnie had little time for him when his younger sibling was in shite mode, asserting on more than one occasion that his brother was “A lazy wee bastard, sorry Dad.”

Young Ronnie just didn’t understand his brother. Steven wasn’t interested in the academic or career-driven path to what others perceived as success. Rather, he just wanted to create things that excited him and was happy with the basics in life. So long as he could empty the many ideas and projects that cluttered his brain onto a canvas or image, the boy was content.

Steven had recently produced photographs of places and people bathed in “light graffiti”. The process of producing these images involved young Steven preparing a location at night, pitch black, opening his camera lens and “painting” the empty air with lights which were captured in the camera lens like the trail of a sparkler moved in the air by a child. These scenes amazed old Ronnie but left him baffled as to where the originality of the “paintings” had sprung from in Steven’s mind.

Ronnie took some stick regularly from the lads in the pub for Steven’s choice of vocation, but laughed it off easily. He was in awe of Steven’s talent and could never have dreamed he’d have such a creative child. Ronnie had no doubt that Steven was by far the happiest and most content of his children but he still shared with his siblings the energy and drive to add something of worth to the world.

Ronnie never compared his children to each other, or to anyone else’s for that matter, but enjoyed each of their achievements equally with pride. “We’ve done not bad for a couple of auld chicken farmers,” he repeated to Agnes often, in reference to their happy and successful children, during a cuddle on the sofa on many an evening. Life had rewarded his hard-working family and Ronnie was looking forward to retiring later that year, having negotiated a very good sale of the farm and surrounding land to a young businessman. The deal would give him and Agnes the financial security to travel for most of their remaining years.

That had been the plan anyway, until Ronnie started having health problems.

It happened infrequently at first. One time, written off as tiredness. Weeks would then pass and again the problem would come. It soon became that more often than not that he would be compelled to leave their bedroom and go downstairs to sit smoking in his armchair until the sting of embarrassment from the latest humiliating episode had subsided and he could face her again. Ronnie had very suddenly and unfortunately become impotent.

He just couldn’t understand it. Ronnie had never had any problems in that department before. Old age, he supposed, absent-mindedly flicking through a men’s magazine to see if he could get his member stirring at the women in its pages. Alas, no response. Far from feeling lust towards the naked and posing girls quite literally spread across the magazine’s pages, Ronnie found himself worrying.

-That lassie could dae wi’ a jumper on. She’s freezin’ judging by thon nipples… Och well. At my time in life it doesn’t matter so much. I’ve got my health, my children and my Agnes. She’s always been the understanding type, and we hardly bother in that department these days anyway. It might have been a big loss ten years ago, but I can live with it now.-

As Ronnie thought it, he relaxed into his seat, relieved that he had found it so easy to accept the newly-dormant nature of his penis. Unfortunately for him, Agnes found it much more difficult to accept his condition. His wife of thirty years left him within three months of his member retiring, and exactly two days before he himself retired.

In the weeks and months that followed, the newly retired Ronnie found himself rattling round the once-family home. Too much time on his hands and too quiet a house. It seemed that the house and Ronnie both missed its former occupants and previously busy rooms. He sold up within a few weeks of Agnes moving out. She had moved into a flat down in Durham with a younger man, forty years old, he’d heard.

Ronnie too, found himself a small flat in nearby Hamilton, and started slowly rebuilding his social life. Snooker with old friends, book clubs, swimming, visiting his kids, his days began to fill and happiness re-entered his newly expanding world again. One thing kept nagging at Ronnie though. He missed having a female companion. It wasn’t the sexual side of the relationship especially, but the intimacy that came with hand-holding and cuddling was a great absence in his life. Climbing into an empty bed also left him empty inside. He couldn’t envisage being able to offer any of his female friends a proper relationship due to his impotence and began cursing the condition he’d once been ambivalent about.

After a great deal of research, visits to a London cosmetic clinic and some soul-searching, Ronnie decided upon a course of action. He used a significant portion of his retirement money and shared profits from the sale of the family home to finance a new, innovative and incredibly effective treatment for impotence.

A penile shaft graft.

The operation sounded brutal. The penis was first lengthened by effectively pulling the internal part through to the outside world, as would happen during the normal erection. It was then sliced lengthways, like a hot-dog bun, and a three-part steel rod inserted. Then it would be stitched back up. The three sections of the rod were joined by a locking hinge at each section, giving the owner the option of click-twisting the hinges in place, straightening and hardening the penis. The operation offered the safety of an instant and unfailing, steel-hard erection. After sex, the wearer would simply twist-pop the steel rod into the at-rest position.

In this rest position it would hang like a normal penis, admittedly a slightly longer and heavier penis than he’d previously possessed, but hey ho. It could be snapped up and out into the ready position with a few quick twists. Easy; even with the wee bit of arthritis in Ronnie’s hands earned from years of handling chicken eggs.

It took four long months to fully heal but Ronnie couldn’t have been happier with the results. The newly-equipped Ronnie wasted no time inviting a lady friend round to his to try out his new boaby. He found it a joy to be able to satisfy a woman again, if a bit strange to be having sex with someone other than Agnes after so many decades. Still, it didn’t bother him for long. Within a month word of Ronnie’s cyborghood had spread and a steady stream of over-fifties widows, divorcees and bored wives began calling on him daily. He’d only ever wanted one lady’s hand but as she’d fucked off and left him, well, he thought that he deserved to indulge himself a wee bit. Never with the married ones though.

Within a year Ronnie and his ever-ready steel penis had become famous from Lanarkshire to the Highlands, and even as far south as Carlisle. Women from all over were contacting him with invitations to come “visit” them at their homes, all expenses paid.

“What can you do?” he’d ask mates in the pub when relaying his stories.

“Snap the auld cock into place and get going Ronnie,” was the standard reply. And so he did.

All in all Ronnie spent ten years, his final ten years as it turned out, travelling the length and breadth of the UK. He spent these trips forming friendships, enjoying food, wine, long walks in the countryside, and many, many women. His exploits earned him the nickname “Ronnie the Rooster”, which paid tribute to his chicken-farming past, and sexually hyper-active present.

No one knows if he visited Agnes in Durham.

Bobby’s Boy and Mark’s other books, Naebody’s Hero, Head Boy and dEaDINBURGH are available now on Amazon